Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, has been interrogated by the Swedish police. His lawyer says he is accused of sexual assault although he fully expects the charges to be dropped.

Leif Silbersky, one of Sweden's top defence lawyers, said police had questioned his client in his presence for about an hour on Monday evening and that the interrogation "went very well. I expect the prosecutor will drop the whole thing."

A duty prosecutor issued an arrest warrant on the evening of Friday 20 August in connection with an allegation of rape, but chief prosecutor Eva Finne abruptly withdrew it the next day saying new information had come to light.

Last week prosecutor Finne said there was no reason to believe a crime had been committed in that case, but added that she had enough evidence to continue investigating an allegation of sexual assault against the 39-year-old Australian from another woman.

"The whole story is very bizarre," Leif Silbersky commented on Tuesday, pointing out that his client had faced "different prosecutors and different charges that have now basically boiled down to nothing."

The lawyer of the two women who made the accusations against Julian Assange said last Friday that he had appealed against the prosecutor's decision not to start a rape investigation.

Mr Assange himself claims the allegations are part of a "smear campaign" aimed at discrediting his whistleblowing website, which is involved in a row with the Pentagon about the release of secret US documents regarding the war in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks published nearly 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan in July and says it will publish another 15,000 in the next week or so.